


The World's Weirdest Job

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: Virtual Series 3 tags [2]
Category: Primeval
Genre: Gen, Virtual Series 3, outsider pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-25
Updated: 2010-01-25
Packaged: 2018-03-09 02:31:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3232940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A new hire at the ARC meets an old one. (An old, recently resurrected one.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The World's Weirdest Job

**Author's Note:**

> The second of several 'episode tags' I wrote for an amazing team effort by several Primeval writers to create a 'Virtual Series 3' - long, plotty fics aiming to mimic the style of one of the TV episodes, joined together in a series.

            There was absolutely no getting round it. Ciarán was totally lost.

                                                  

            He cursed himself softly; he would not be in this situation if he hadn’t agreed to join the stupid ARC. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Just because he thought it sounded interesting and he’d wanted the chance to study real live dinosaurs, and his old friend Connor worked there and spoke well of it when Lester let him talk to Ciarán about it. Connor had said it wasn’t exactly nine-to-five (that didn’t matter, as far as Ciarán was concerned), often dangerous (possibly, Ciarán had guessed, if you were a nitwit with no sense of self-preservation like Connor), involved too much physical exercise (again, probably true if you were Connor, who’d never been exactly athletic) but also totally fascinating (Ciarán imagined that was true). He was a total idiot, and he had a crashing hangover, and where the hell was the infirmary and why was this building such a damn rabbit warren, everything looked exactly the same...

 

            Ciarán consoled himself with the reflection that he was not alone in his idiocy. His girlfriend, Anna, had been part of the Physics department here for some time, and his old teacher, Dr. Williams, had taken the offered job as head of a second anomaly response team. Dr. Williams, who happened to be a former amateur rugby player and the younger sister of four boisterous elder brothers, had been muttering about a Dr. Butterworth, Health and Safety, Misplaced Gallantry and Embuggerances, so Ciarán was fairly certain that he was not the only one who was cheesed off by some aspects of the ARC.

 

            He bumped into Caroline Steel, another new recruit, disengaged himself, mumbled an apology, and kept walking. Going out for a drink with some of the Special Forces lads last night had been a mistake. He hadn’t been first under the table, that was Ben Maguire, but his head felt as if a blind giant was bumbling about in it and he’d had approximately two hours’ sleep.

 

            After a while and getting several sets of directions muddled, he found the infirmary, opened the door and went in, immediately tripping over an oddly placed metal rubbish bin; both he and the bin crashed noisily to the floor, but only he swore.

 

            Propping himself up on his elbows and letting out a heartfelt groan for his own clumsiness, fecklessness and general lack of intelligence, Ciarán observed a slightly battered-looking man with grey eyes, short-cropped sandy hair and the faint edges of an amused smile lurking in the upturned corners of his mouth. He was sitting up in bed, fully dressed in standard black overalls, and Ciarán guessed that he’d woken him.

 

            “Sorry,” Ciarán apologised, prising himself off the floor and picking up the rubbish bin. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

 

            “That’s OK. Who are you?”

 

            Ciarán suddenly realised that he didn’t exactly look like a smart employee of a top-secret government facility, what with his general air of really regretting the night before, bashed-about jeans and grey jumper, and decided to explain his presence. He didn’t recognise the man, but that wasn’t unusual. There were hundreds of people at the ARC, and he’d been there less than two weeks. “I’m Ciarán O’Murphy, on the second anomaly response team. Old friend of Connor Temple’s. D’you know where the painkillers are? I have a hangover.”

 

            The unknown man chuckled, as if he’d suspected just that from the moment Ciarán had tumbled in, and pointed him towards the treatment room, where Matt Rees currently held sway. Matt grinned at Ciarán’s request for painkillers, but complied, handing him a plastic cup of water and the required medicine. Ciarán thanked him, and then left –Matt appeared to be in the middle of a personal phonecall, and Ciarán didn’t want to interrupt.

 

            He wandered back into the room where the unknown man was still sitting, but apparently still awake, and put the medicine in the water. It fizzed, dissolving. “Who are you, by the way?” he asked. “You look sort of familiar.”

 

            “I’m Captain Ryan.”

 

            Ciarán thought about this as the medicine finished dissolving. The name was familiar too- he wondered where he’d heard or seen it... He drank the mixture, and almost snorted it out of his nose as he remembered, choking and spluttering and staring at ‘Captain Ryan’, coughing out a couple of unspeakable Irish swearwords as soon as he could talk. He had last seen this man on the soldiers’ cork board, a dog-eared photo of a man smiling and the terse note CAPT. TOM RYAN pinned to it, next to a more recent one which was labelled STEPHEN HART. Ciarán knew who Stephen Hart was, Connor had –reluctantly- explained, but Captain Ryan, although presumably just as dead as Stephen, was quite clearly alive and kicking.

 

            Either that, or the tosser was messing with his head, but that seemed unlikely.

 

            He regained his breath and his composure, still staring at Captain Ryan. “You’re _never_. He’s dead!”

 

            “I thought everyone’d heard by now,” Captain Ryan commented.

 

            Ciarán shook his head, and regretted it; the painkillers had not kicked in yet. “Not me, mate. I spent most of yesterday chasing ammonites round an Olympic swimming pool in Sheffield. I heard something about an anomaly onto the Cretaceous extinction event, Conn got _very_ excited about it, but nothing about people who’re back from the dead. Bloody hell. _Are_ you back from the dead?”

 

            Captain Ryan nodded, folding his arms. “People keep saying so, yeah. Temple’s theory is something about changes to evolution- time bubbles- Cutter- somebody called Claudia Brown... I didn’t catch most of it.”

 

            Ciarán nodded carefully. It didn’t hurt now. “Sounds right to me.” He stared at Ryan for a few more moments, unable to restrain himself, but luckily Ryan didn’t seem offended. “Christ,” he mumbled involuntarily, crushing the plastic cup and throwing it into the bin he’d knocked over earlier. “Can this job get any weirder?”

 

            “How long have you been here?” Captain Ryan enquired, sounding sympathetic.

 

            “Two weeks.”

 

            “Then yes. It can get a _lot_ weirder.”


End file.
